from. Our sleeping bags were like dominos, I thought when I got up and went off to pee
with the fanny pack that held our toilet paper. There was a sandwich bag for the used
remnants. I squatted under a nearly full moon, opalescent and scary huge, and the stars
were crazy bright and real in a way I was not used to. I was an expert at outdoor peeing,
all those nights at an abandoned barn, boozing with friends. I was entirely sober here,
and I listened to my urine hit the Utah earth with satisfaction. I was with strangers, but I
didn’t feel lonely. I felt new. Susan from Illinois. As I walked through the dark, back to
my sleeping bag, our leader, Katie, sat up and whispered, “Everything all right?” Now I
know how young she really was at twenty-two, how inexperienced and scared. She had a
face she hadn’t learned to tame yet, and her emotions played across her plain features
like water. On her right forearm arm, a T shaped scar, running up the main artery, still
pink. She was raw and couldn’t lie for shit, and I wondered if I was the only one who had
caught on to the fact she might not be the best person to be supervising six teenagers in
the backcountry of Utah.
Billy and I hit it off immediately. He was taller than any boy I’d ever met, with
a shock of orange-blonde hair and so many freckles they all ran together. He loved Florida and Marx brother movies, and was too open for his own good. He was funny and safe,
and wanted to be liked, so we all chose him as our youth leader. Joshua was an introvert. I
liked to watch him work. All of his movements were precise, from lopping overhanging
branches and tamarisk, to spraying the fruit punch colored plant killer, to intently combing his mass of black curls. He was constantly cleaning his glasses on the edge of his
filthy t-shirt, putting them back on and peering at the world as if he expected some
change. He liked country music, and we made fun of him, until one night midway
through our eight weeks when everyone was homesick, he sang Johnny Cash and Willie
Nelson and Hank Williams in a voice that forced me to the girl’s tent. I needed to be inside, concealed. Out there, under that darkening sky, I felt too exposed. I didn’t cry, but I
was aware my skin was there to keep me tethered, rooted, moored. When Joshua stopped,
I heard Katie, in her one-person tent, alone, trying to muffle her weeping and not succeeding.
Amy was a vegan, which dictated our meal menu, but we were all cool with it.
We were more interested in why she was from Utah and chose Utah. The way she explained it, where she lived, and how her family lived, it meant she never went anywhere.
Her folks were hardcore back to lenders. Amy and I wrote to one another forever, real
letters, until her husband shot her, in the cabin her own parents had built by hand, to
keep her from leaving with their five kids. I kept every letter, read her movement from
vegan hippy to full ride scholarship, to MIT where she studied robotics and engineering
and discovered punk rock and bike messengering, until she quit school, wanting to dismantle the whole middle class system, to meeting her husband at a protest, to moving
back to Utah to take care of her sick father, to taking over the land and home, birthing
five kids. We never saw each other again in person, but I flew out for her funeral, and the
photographs of her aligned with how I imagined her. Her kids lined up in front of the
closed casket, and I couldn’t bear to hear their voices up close. I wanted to stay in the
space between imagining and knowing how they sounded. I was sick with grief, but hearing their voices speak to me, looking into their faces would have forced me to know
something I didn’t want to fully realize. We’d been pen pals. I had no right to be there.
But back then, we were both seventeen, and we watched D’Arcy and Sean with equal
measures of longing and envy.
Let me be clear. I hated D’Arcy as deeply as I was infatuated by Sean. They were
a couple before I even landed, that’s what Amy said. D’Arcy was all the girls we ever detested, only worse because she was sweet, smart, and poetic, so we felt bad about it. Sean
was fine boned, each muscle clear beneath his brown skin, his bleached hair falling over
his brown eyes. His teeth were so white and straight because his dad was an orthodontist.
Amy and I knew it was hopeless, but we’d still seek out one another’s eyes as they’d go
off to filter water. Katie would watch them go too.
When I came home, I couldn’t articulate what I’d experienced. I couldn’t explain what it was like when I got to shower for the first time in two months. In the Ranger’s bathroom, I examined myself in the mirror the night before I flew home. My skin